Chapter Eight #2
“Sorry, this has become a ‘who’s on first?’ situation for me. So you don’t want to go to dinner with Austin? Or you do? I’m confused.”
“I—” Ivy hesitated. She was confused, too. Going on a date with Austin was supposed to be everything she had ever wanted, so why was she having a hard time getting excited about it? Did it not feel real yet? Would the giddy butterflies materialize when she was doing her makeup for their date?
Why the hell did she keep thinking about the look on Grant’s face when Austin asked her out?
“I’m not as excited as I thought I would be.”
Brad snorted. “Oh no. A TV heartthrob wants to take you to dinner and then probably eat you for dessert. What a horrible position to be in.”
“I sound ridiculous, don’t I?”
“Extremely. But lucky for you, you have a brilliant, gorgeous, amazing best friend who is willing to be your unlicensed therapist from anywhere in the world.”
“So, what’s the solution, Dr. Brad?”
“You go on the damn date. If it sucks, you finally close the chapter on this crush. If it doesn’t suck, well, you’ll be bouncing up and down on TV-star dick.”
Ivy sighed. “What about Grant?”
“Who’s Gr— The brother. Right. Why do we care what he thinks?”
She worked her bottom lip with her teeth, mulling over the question. “Because we were friends. Plus, he had such an intensely bad reaction when I accidentally told him I had feelings for Austin that I want to prove him wrong.”
“The way all the best love stories start: spite.”
“It’s not like that,” Ivy insisted. “Have you seen Austin? He’s…” She made a mind blown gesture that wordlessly captured the brain-scrambling gorgeousness of Austin Underwood.
“I know. My eyeballs work really well after I put in my contacts.” Brad yawned. “Babe, you do not have enough information to freak out yet. Go on the date. If nothing else, you get to tell everyone you went out with the shirtless sheriff.”
“Okay, okay.” Ivy picked at a loose thread on her comforter, trying to muster some enthusiasm. “I will go on the date for the plot and see what happens.”
“Atta girl. Did you pack anything devastating?”
“Of course not. I was coming to visit my parents, not get dicked down in a tree house.”
“I’m going to need you to elaborate on that at another time, but you need to go shopping ASAP.”
Ivy groaned.
“I’m going to find food,” Brad said, “and you are going to send me some outfits.”
“He hasn’t texted me to confirm anything, and I have to run errands for my parents. My mom wants to throw my dad a surprise retirement party and I’ve been volun-told to organize it.”
“Aren’t you there to help them pack?”
“Paul and Sophie love a side quest.” Ivy dug through her open suitcase, looking for pants. “I doubt it’ll be a big party. A few faculty members, Dad’s grad students, maybe some of the neighbors, and a few people from church. It’ll be fine.”
It was not fine. After promising to send Brad outfit options, Ivy hung up and saw the email from her mom.
“There are seventy-five people on this guest list!” Ivy shouted when she got her mother on the phone. “Where are we having this party? We cannot fit this many people in the house.”
“They’re not all going to show up,” Sophie soothed, her keyboard clacking merrily in the background. “We don’t want to offend anybody by not inviting them.”
“Who cares who you’re offending? You’re skipping town soon.” Ivy buried her hand in her hair. “Mom, we cannot have this at the house.”
“It has to be at the house. There isn’t another venue.”
Ivy groaned. “You have to trim the guest list. What if they all say yes?”
“They won’t,” Sophie insisted. “I need to head into a meeting— Oh! Can you pick up some tortillas for dinner? Love you.”
Sophie hung up before Ivy could protest about the guest list again.
Their house wasn’t small, but it wasn’t let’s host seventy-five people big.
On the bright side, this would be a great motivator for her mother to declutter.
If only she could get her dad to do the same without spilling the beans about his surprise party.
Ivy took her laptop, which she’d packed for the sole purpose of watching trash TV in her room, and set up a workstation at her desk.
She read through her mother’s email again, still shuddering at the guest list, and began contacting potential vendors.
With any luck, they’d all be booked and she could talk her mom into planning something small at the university.
The woman worked in administration. There had to be numerous strings she could pull. People owed her favors.
She promised herself she wouldn’t check her phone for a text from Austin until she’d made real progress on her mother’s requests. And she kept that promise…
For a whole five minutes.
Ivy regretted her weakness when she looked at her phone, which boasted exactly zero notifications.
Suddenly she was eighteen again, waiting for an invitation to hang with the Underwoods—well, one Underwood in particular.
Here she was, back home after so much time away, and it felt like she’d never really left.
But no. No. She couldn’t let herself lose sight of all the ways she’d grown since leaving Coeur-de-Lac.
She was a world traveler now, a woman who’d visited over twenty countries and covered tens of thousands of miles in the air.
She’d met people from every corner of the globe, every walk of life.
She’d gone places and she’d seen things, and coming back to her parents’ house didn’t negate any part of all the living she’d done while she was gone.
Ivy knew all that—knew it in her brain and her gut.
If only her heart could believe it, too.